Today was another professional day, we had visits with multiple personalities across the board. It was a full day of lectures and tours across Media City campus in Manchester. It seemed like this was a Manchester version of Silicon Valley.
When we arrived at media city and it was a sight to behold. The campus we were on was a media paradise. The University of Salford’s campus is right there with BBC studios so the students get a first hand look at a major media conglomerate and allowing the students to get first hand experience with them. it’s an amazing setup to have from a University to your career building jobs.
We got a tour from Annabelle Waller through some of the broadcasting departments main TV studious, and saw how their students are working on campus. The tour then turned into a lecture as she explained to us a new type of Journalism that is being tested and about to be released.
The immersion of Virtual Reality into documentaries can expose people to certain situations they would never come into contact with. This type of media is amazing and can open the worlds perspectives to new ideas and roles we can play into bettering ourselves. In the short film she played for us, I was hooked in. I just wanted to have an Oculus VR headset so I could fully immerse my self into the solitary confinement experience.
After Annabelle was finished with her presentation, James Probert came in to speak with us. Probert was a refreshing voice to hear as he never knew what he wanted to do and then ended up helping produce content for a show on the BBC called Blue Rabbit. The show is one of longest running shows in TV history and him just walking on with little idea of what he was doing is just an incredible story for us to hear.
As a Junior in college the question I’m always asked is what do you want to do after graduation, and the answer is still I don’t know, so its nice to know like minded people can make something happen.
Next we had some free time for lunch and then went over to the BBC to get a tour of their broadcasting and Radio studios. The BBC or British Broadcasting Corporation moved to Manchester to better represent their audiences and they made a real campus for themselves.
I am a big supporter of BBC America as they are one of the only media outlets that are still in Venezuela covering the crisis going on there, so this tour was an incredible experience. I was able to see where some of the major reporters sit and learn how they set up the sets for each show. The studio was nothing how it looks on TV it was crazy to see the differences from in person to on camera.
Seeing the broadcasting side of BBC was nice for the fan inside me, but for the professional side I wanted to see more of their Journalism department and how they produce the news they report on.
As the tour concluded we got to play on an active set and see how the reporters react on screen to the green screens around them. Everyone was having fun playing with the weather and pretending to be a TV show host it was an great way to end the lectures for the day.
We then hopped on a bus to the hotel for the night. After dinner with the group we were able to work school work for a little. Our hotel was outside the city by the airport so it was a little bit of a drag not being able to walk around Manchester but we are off to Edinburgh in the morning.